Coordinated-Care Model Better for Chronic Pain Patient Satisfaction

NATIONAL HARBOR -- Care coordination was the most important factor in chronic pain patients' perception of satisfaction with care, study findings indicate.

“While pain medicine providers contribute substantially to the patient satisfaction, we found the most central determinant of satisfaction to be care coordination,” Ming-Chih Kao, MD, PhD, of Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, said during a poster session at the American Academy of Pain Medicine 2015 meeting.

Kao and colleagues administered the 20-item Stanford Patient Experience Questionnaire (SPEQ) to 628 patients who visited a academic multidisciplinary pain center during a 3-week period to characterize aspects of the patient experience that drive patient satisfaction. A total of 123 patients completed the questionnaire.

The researchers performed a touch-point factor analysis and multi-dimensional scaling to determine the importance of patient experience in seven domains: access, scheduling, admission and check-in, care coordination, nursing assist, provider and outcomes.

“Notably, item-level factor analysis in the first factor found scheduling and communications to constitute 45% of the variance in patient satisfaction,” Kao said.

Care coordination and outcomes were responsible for 32% of variance, followed by patient-facing staff and provider (22%), and outcomes and provider (15%), the researchers found.

When they analyzed the relationships between touch-points, they found satisfaction with care coordination had the highest correlation with others (average r 0.74).

“Future efforts should shift from a provider-centric model into one that focuses on delivering coordinated care,” Kao said.